2004. Commissioned by United Designers for Robert Bosch GmbH. Designed with Erik Spiekermann. Some styles produced with Christian Acker and Joshua Darden. Cyrillic, Greek and Office Sans by URW. Not available for relicensing.

Bosch has a long history of using Akzidenz Grotesk, but it was finally starting to show its age as they were moving further into the consumer market. As part of a new corporate design program he was working on with his team at United Designers, Erik Spiekermann asked me to re-imagine what Akzidenz could have been if it took a rounder, friendlier evolutionary path from Schelter & Giesecke's Grotesk, which I had already revived as FF Bau. The result is Bosch Sans, a simple but friendly sans with a distinctive semi-cursive italic.

Before Roger decided he wanted a Venetian Oldstyle for the Houston Chronicle, I had spent a day playing around with a news Baskerville. Before switching to Minion a few years ago, Bosch had used a few different cuts of Baskerville as the companion serif face to Akzidenz. I borrowed the idea for abrupt corners on the ball terminals from ITC Charter, which Erik and I have both long admired for being one of the world's perfect office typefaces. The face also got a good helping of Teutonic rigidity (tempered by the italic, which borrows from Bulmer), making the face a good foil for the warmth of the Sans.

I was deep into the Guardian project when these fonts needed to be delivered, so Christian Acker (mainly on the Sans) and Joshua Darden (mainly on the Condensed Sans and Serif) were a big help with a lot of the production work. URW insisted on drawing the Greek and Cyrillic versions in-house, and I think they're decent, but could be better. The Office Sans they built is fantastic, though. It matches Arial's character widths, so it can be substituted into existing documents and reinforce the brand identity without ruining line breaks or copyfit.